This website uses cookies to help us give you the best experience when you visit our website. By continuing to use this website, you consent to our use of these cookies. For full details visit https://www.iainabernethy.co.uk/legal-information

This website uses cookies to help us give you the best experience when you visit our website. By continuing to use this website, you consent to our use of these cookies. For full details visit https://www.iainabernethy.co.uk/legal-information

That’s a good video. It’s got a good bit of swearing in it, so people need to be mindful of that when watching.

The points made are totally valid because an unarmed one-on-one consensual fighting methodology is not a good fit for dealing with potentially armed multiple criminals in non-consensual violence. As always, we need methods that fit the nature of the situation and the objective.

The video may be a little unfair at times though. The methods critiqued are not “bad” in the context of MMA. They work in that context and we need to be careful not to critique oranges for not being “appley” enough.

While it’s undeniable true that many folk don’t get that what is optimum in one context can be disastrous in another, we need to be careful about engaging in the same faulty thinking but from the other end i.e. criticising methods designed for use in one context for their failure to work in another. What is valid to critique is people failing to get how the shift in context changes everything. The video includes a number of good examples that illustrate that point.

Worst positions? When the enemy has a knife the only good position is to be in a different postcode

That’s totally true, but being on the floor with an armed enemy is worse than being upright … precisely because being locked up on the floor makes escaping exponentially more difficult.

So the positions they show in the above video can fairly be described as being “the worst”. Nothing is “good”, but there are definitely varying levels of “bad”. I think that needs to be acknowledged otherwise we don’t identify and seek the “least bad”, and could go to “the worst” by default through falling to differentiate between contexts.

We see a similar thing sometimes being said when it comes to multiple enemies too (normally from those heavily invested in ground fighting) i.e. “there is no good solution, and therefore all degrees of bad are equal” … and that’s both logically and practically false.

There is no “good solution” to multiple enemies, but it is “better / less worse” to be on our feet and moving, because that gives us the best chance of escape … it is worse to be grappling because the mobility needed to escape is reduced … it is the worst to be on the floor locked on to one person because we are totally vulnerable to all others and in the worst possible position to escape.

I therefore think we need to be careful of making a binary “good” vs. “bad” value judgement and concluding there is no “good” and everything is equally “bad”. The truth is there is no good solutions to these problems, but there are definitely degrees of better, worse and worst. We therefore need to favour the “least bad” and do our utmost to avoid the “worst”.